Film Review: Black Hawk Down

Ridley Scott tries his hand at the war movie thing

With Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer have teamed up to
direct and produce a suitably shallow and macho military romp for the
post-September 11th movie-going audience.

Starring
Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor and Tom Sizemore, the action is set over a period
of 24 hours in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu in October 1993. From a secure
airport base outside the city, the US military send in elite Delta and Ranger
forces to capture key lieutenants of Mohammad Farah Aideed, a powerful warlord
who is starving his people to death.

The men are kidnapped but two helicopters are shot down and most of the
troops become surrounded by thousands of fanatical militiamen. The Americans are
eventually rescued, but not before 19 of them are killed from a variety of
gruesome wounds.

The fighting is gritty and realistic, but in the final analysis there is
little else to this film. You can have too much of a good thing and Black Hawk
Down is what happens when you take the ?good bits? from Saving Private Ryan and
make an entire movie from them. It's not exactly boring, but it's hard to escape
the desire for ?something? to happen.

Of the principal leads, Hartnett gives the impression that he couldn't lead a
boy-band out of a studio let alone a Special Forces unit out of enemy territory,
while McGregor is very watchable, albeit with an unconvincing American accent.
Tom Sizemore is his usual dependable self as a grizzled veteran who has an
aversion to ducking gunfire.

Thankfully, there are no overly heroic sacrifices or acts of valour in this
film. However, the differences between the good guys and the bad guys become
evident in their deaths, of which there are plenty. The Americans cling to
family photos, and beg their comrades to tell their parents/wife they loved them
before succumbing in suitably dramatic fashion. The Somalis are butchered in
their thousands, nice and clean, one shot kills all, in true videogame
tradition.

And even if American heroics are more understated than in most Hollywood war
movies, the depiction of the Somalis undoes this good work. The only locals
actually to speak are greedy, ruthless and bloodthirsty; leaders or members of
the militia forces. The offering of a cigarette to a captured US soldier is the
extent of the humanisation of the Somalis.

We are given no solid reason why the mission failed so spectacularly. The
native informer is portrayed as unsure and untrustworthy, but this alone should
not have doomed the raid. As the convoy of Hummers and their Black Hawk air
support leaves the airport, we see a Somalian child using a cellular phone to
warn the warlords in the city of their advance.

So was this it? A kid with a mobile was responsible for the bloody collapse
of the American operation? If so, could the commandos not have left their base
more discreetly and rendezvous somewhere en route to the target? We don't know
the answers to any of these questions because the film simply ignores them.

And on an even more fundamental level, what were the Americans doing there in
the first place? Scott and Bruckheimer deem a few on-screen captions during the
opening sequence to be sufficient, but it's an issue that would deserve a proper
explanation in a serious screen treatment.

The decidedly un-American lack of mawkish sentiment is eventually abandoned
towards the end, as we get a load of tosh about saying a prayer for Daddy, and
how no one wants to be heroes, sometimes it just turns out that way, blah blah
blah. You could see Bruckheimer itching to get that bit in.

As the final credits roll, the 19 American fatalities are listed. The
faceless nature of the Somalis is confirmed with a caption acknowledging the
deaths of 1000 locals during the raid. Needless to say none of them warrant a
personal mention. This death toll was obviously given to the filmmakers by the
US military advisors, as it is considerably less than a CIA estimate of
7,000?10, 000 Somali deaths, quoted by Foreign Policy magazine.

There is no political context provided in Black Hawk Down ? it is meant as
self-contained, boys-own adventure that could easily be transferred to just
about any theatre of war ? the Somalian ?skinnies? in this movie could have been
the ragheads of Iraq or the gooks of Vietnam. However with the geo-political
reasoning of a studio kingpin, Three Kings is too recent in the memory and
Vietnam has been done to death, so Somalia it is.